Unit installation

F-4

limit, just a limit on how fast you can send it to the controller. If you need to know what the

responses are, you need to insert pauses while your communications program sends the commands

to the RLC-3. Slowing the baud rate down will not help significantly, as that will slow down the

responses just as much as the commands you are sending. There are several ways to do this:

Tell the comm program to wait until it sees a new "DTMF>" prompt before sending the next

line. To do this with the Windows 3.1 terminal program , go to the "Settings" menu, select

"Text Transfers", then select flow control of "Line at a Time" and set a "Wait for Prompt

String" of "DTMF>". Other comm programs will only let you set a single pacing character.

You can try '>' (the last character in the "DTMF>" prompt). Waiting for a new prompt, or

at least the last character of it, is the best method because it makes the comm program wait

exactly as long as needed for the controller to finish the previous command.

Change the ASCII transfer settings on your communications software to insert a 1.5 second

delay after each line (longer for slow baud rates, shorter for fast baud rates). This will give

the RLC-3 time to send the responses back without overflowing the queue. You may have

to experiment to get enough delay to avoid overflowing without having to wait all day for

the upload to finish.

If you can't figure out how to do either of the above methods, you can try putting tilde

characters at the end of each line in you upload file, like this:

N000 11 ; comment ~~~

The tilde tells most comm programs to pause for a bit, usually 1/2 to 1 second.

Serial responses to commands entered from a radio:

Normally the commands that are entered from a radio do not cause anything to be sent out of the

serial port; that is they are "suppressed". This lets you program the controller from the serial port

while people are entering DTMF commands without them causing confusing messages to show up

on the serial screen. If you want to see the commands that are being entered from the radios, you

can turn "suppressed" serial off with command 060.

Very Long Serial Commands:

This section only applies to very long serial commands. If a line fits on the screen (80 characters

wide), it isn't long enough to worry about. But there may be times when you make a very long

command, maybe programming a voice message:

; make macro 500 speak one two three four five six seven eight

053 500 036 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 ; comment

There is an internal line length limit; you will get an error message if you exceed it. If you do

exceed it, check the following things: make sure there is a ';' right after the command, even if the

comment is way off to the right. It is ok if the comment exceeds the line length limit - that won't

cause an error, it just won't let you backspace once you have exceeded the limit.